


this heart of mine

by chrysalizzm



Series: young god [3]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angst, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Queerplatonic Relationships, They/Them Pronouns for Eret (Video Blogging RPF), Unconventional Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:43:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29610993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalizzm/pseuds/chrysalizzm
Summary: “And for them... for them, he’d do anything.”It’s been a month since the madness was excised from their world.The past is catching up to Dream.(Or: There is no war, this time; no battlefield, no swords crossed, no blood burning on a blade. That does not mean there are no casualties.)
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: young god [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999633
Comments: 136
Kudos: 385





	1. you'll be someone you wouldn't understand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> when we die, we come back different, / like, with greener eyes, / or as some far off star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (the chapter titles and summaries aren’t mine!! they’re “a softer world” comic strips that i felt applied to the chapters ^^)
> 
> welcome back, everyone! and welcome to the sequel for you’re human tonight. there won’t really be a consistent upload schedule, but i promise i won’t let months go by without updating. atlas updates may slow down during this time, as i’m also hoping to work on the dsmp big bang, and a collaborative fic with some of the members of the young god discord, and i’ve been employed, and i’m waiting on college decisions (help). all that funny “i’m busy” jargon aside, i’ve been looking forward to writing this fic for a while now, and i hope you enjoy!

It’s a good day.

It’s been a good month, actually, for the most part, and Phil’s surprised by how well he settles into Dream’s world considering how far removed he considered himself from the rest of the SMP just weeks before. His intent wasn’t really to impose - he’s always operated just fine on his own, exhibit A, his home world of sixteen years, built into a well-oiled machine all by himself - but something about the server and the people in it makes it hard to completely withdraw from their company in favor of finding a secluded corner of the server to run off to. If Phil were feeling particularly callous he might comment that trauma really brings people together like nothing else can, but he knows full well that that’s a disservice to how close the members of Dream’s world are - he knows plenty of them are childhood friends or formed family units when they were younger, and for how exclusive they seem they integrate newcomers seamlessly: Puffy settled in immediately in Niki’s house above the homey little bakery, and Ranboo found a place to stay in Eret’s castle with ease. 

But back to the point - it’s a good day. Phil woke up to Quackity crashing through his bedroom window at four in the morning shrieking expletives, but other than blearily getting up and tossing the former Vice President right back out of his window and repairing the glass with a yawn, it’s been an uneventful morning. His kids don’t live with him in the idyllic cottage he’s built into a L’Manberg hillside (“If I have to live in this fucking hobbit hole with you I think I’d fucking die,” Tommy had told him once as bluntly as once could expect from Tommy), but today Wil swings by for breakfast, armed with his guitar and a loaf of day-old soda bread courtesy of Niki. Halfway through a slice he starts strumming, getting a fair bit of crumbs everywhere save the instrument itself, and Phil grins at him as he hums, plucking at strings experimentally.

“Might start writing again,” he tells Phil offhand, adjusting his capo, and Phil can’t help the burst of joy that burns under his breastbone, like a single flicker of fireworks; for the first week Phil had been here, Wilbur had tossed and turned and picked at his food, let his beloved guitars gather dust beside his records and barely touched his notebooks. To hear his eldest picking out arpeggios, making a face, adjusting the tuning, trying out rhyming schemes -

“That’s brilliant, Wil,” he tells Wilbur earnestly, leaning forward onto his elbows on the counter, and Wilbur turns just in time to catch Phil’s haori swirling into wings, unfurling to take up a good portion of the kitchen and making the room significantly more claustrophobic. Wilbur snorts and cracks a joke about not getting his feathers in a twist and Phil rolls his eyes and tucks his wings close to his back, but they both know perfectly well why it happened; Phil’s wings are more subconscious than intentional, and Wilbur’s father has always seen Wilbur’s music to Wilbur as flying is to him.

“What’re your plans for today?” asks Wilbur as he scoots past Phil to dunk his plate in the sink. “Day’s still young, or whatever you boomers say.”

“I’m going to punt you straight into the fucking sun,” Phil tells his son cheerily, and Wilbur guffaws as he breezes out of the kitchen with his guitar slung over his shoulder. Weighing the dirty plate in his hand and the impulse to brain Wilbur with it, he calls after him, “And I’m busy during the morning. Why, you need something?”

The front door creaks shut, but Phil can hear Wilbur shout loud and clear through the open sitting room windows as he passes by: “I’m not eight anymore, Phil, I’m fine. Make sure you talk to Ponk and Eret about the suits, though!”

“I thought you said you were gonna talk to them,” Phil yells, but when ten full seconds go by without a response, he guesses Wilbur’s left. He sighs and drops the plate back into the sink, folds his wings back into a haori and sails back into his own room to gather potions and armor.

Phil’s technically on the right side of the “border” to be considered part of L’Manberg, but his closest neighbors live a solid twenty-minute walk away, so as far as the rest of the SMP is concerned, he’s a hermit (or so Puffy told him teasingly at the weekly communal breakfast after he showed up late, harried, carrying a string bag of oranges). It’s Phil’s preferred style of living - there are extroverts, and there are introverts, and then there’s Phil - but it also makes his house a convenient final pit stop before SMP members go out exploring uncharted areas of Dream’s world, as well as the designated sparring grounds if you don’t want the pageantry of duelling on Eret’s front lawn. Phil knows Techno and Dream have some sort of biweekly spar scheduled that he can’t for the life of him figure out the pattern of, and Punz and Purpled have been practicing out in the clearing, too. 

But the hundred and twenty chunks of distance are for another, arguably more important reason.

When Phil opens the door with his pauldrons tucked under his arm, Dream is standing outside, his axe and shield and pack of extra potions lying in the grass beside him as he stretches his arms. He’s a limber kid, even recuperating, and Phil studies him as he rolls his own shoulders - Dream’s a traceur through and through, and it’s what makes him especially good in combat, in direct contrast to Techno, whose main strength is the art of the fight itself. They’re not going to be fighting - in Phil’s humble opinion, there’s nothing in the way of combat he could offer Dream that would be useful to him - but it never hurts to be prepared.

Dream straightens up, notices him, breaks out into a grin. “Hey, Phil,” he says brightly, adjusting his mask to center on his face. “Saw Wilbur on my way here.” The grin softens out into a smile and he adds, “He’s doing better.”

Phil reaches out with a wing to muss up Dream’s hair fondly, ignoring the protest he gets when he tangles his ponytail. “A lot better,” he replies, thinking of dusty strings and ink-blackened pages, shaky hands and flasks of water, young faces wan and thin and grey-eyed with hurt. He came here after the fact, but that means he was around to help out in little ways as individual people recovered from the little things that Dream couldn’t help with - rebuilding sections of L’Manberg that were burned down in a cathartic fury, or letting people vent to him about some little inconvenience that burgeoned into a trauma-unpacking session, or volunteering to scrap the empty houses that had lined Manberg’s walkways like a cemetery so that those who still wanted to live under the L’Manbergian flag could build whatever the hell they liked. That last one might’ve been a mistake - Phil thinks Punz may put a hit on whoever vandalized the walls of his house with obsidian blocks spelling out “short king” just so that he can murder them himself - but there’s more laughing than crying in L’Manberg nowadays, and isn’t that really the point?

Phil shakes himself out of his reverie, claps his hands together. “Right, so - terraforming. Let’s see how it is today,” he prompts, and Dream takes a deep, bracing breath, spreads his feet further apart, raises his arms. 

Mentoring a minor god, much like mentoring a teenage Technoblade, is a messy business. To Techno’s credit, quelling the voices when they got too loud and treating accidentally-mortal wounds were a bit easier than trying to gauge the limits of Dream’s power without letting him overexert himself, but given Phil’s no more than a normal person in Dream’s world save the sweep of his wings (which is an entirely different can of worms - to this day Phil has no idea how his self-concept was so strong it gave him functional _wings_ ), it’s probably an unfair comparison. That said, Phil’s sons didn’t call him in for nothing.

The earth under Phil’s feet roils unsteadily, and Phil steps back a block or two to watch as Dream scoops up the soil from Phil’s front lawn, rearranges it with a decent amount of dexterity to spell out “short king,” and guffaws at the look on Phil’s face.

“That was you, huh.” 

“Guilty as charged.” Dream peers over his handiwork a touch too smugly. “Punz’ll never guess - last he told me, he thought it was either Puffy and Sam.”

“Doing the elders’ work, I see,” says Phil, more amused than he lets on, though judging by the knowing look Dream throws him, he doesn’t really do a good job of being disapproving. Clearing his throat, Phil nudges the packed soil and asks, “One through ten?”

Dream twirls his wrists slowly. “Hm... one. It’s just dirt, and it’s not like I did anything that crazy with it.”

Phil raises an eyebrow. “And that’s a hundred percent honest?”

“Phil, you’re a minor god - you _know_ how easy dirt manipulation is.”

“And you know that the abilities of a minor god are case-by-case. Just because something comes easy to you doesn’t mean it comes easy to me, and vice versa. We talked about this, yeah?” Phil raises the other eyebrow too, and Dream looks away sheepishly. “How you’re good at mob control and I’m a bit shit at it?”

“...Like a three,” Dream finally relents, and Phil snorts, “Like pulling teeth with you, mate. Wanna do something more finicky with the worldediting?”

“What, like plant growth, or just bigger terraforming?”

“Either. Both. Whatever you want.”

Dream huffs at Phil’s nonanswer and waves his hand flippantly at the ground by his feet. An oak tree, painfully out-of-place amongst the birches that rim Phil’s cottage, bursts forth from the earth in a spray of displaced pebbles and writhing roots. Phil draws back further; watches the canopy of leaves froth up overhead until it stops growing, a veritable giant towering over the rest of the squat silver trees around them, and looks back down to find Dream grinning triumphantly, showered in leaves, an acorn nesting in his curls. “Three again,” he tells Phil, no small amount of satisfaction in his voice.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you, mate,” Phil laughs, plucking the flyaway sticks out of his own hair as he strolls over. It’s iffy with Dream’s abilities - some days his world bends to his will like paper in a stream, and other days it’s like throwing himself over and over at a wall of bedrock - which is why Phil established a one-to-ten system with Dream early on, one for “I could do this asleep” and ten for “I think I might die.” It works like a charm for the most part, though Dream, the competitive motherfucker that he is, has a bad habit of downplaying how hard something is because he always thinks it could be a lot worse. Phil’s never had the same sort of consistency issues, but he knows full well that he’s an anomaly among minor gods for the strength of his power. Cases like Dream’s, where there are wild fluctuations and general all-around weakness compared to the average, don’t seem that common, but like Phil has told Dream over and over: minor gods’ abilities vary wildly person by person, and it’s not like Dream relies that much on his powers anyway.

No, what’s especially unconventional about Dream is his settling.

“That’s that, then. You did mob control already today, yeah?” Phil asks, just to confirm; he saw the incoherent keysmashing in the general comms this morning about a horde of cows.

Dream smirks and says, “Just a few cows. Nothing big. A one.”

“You are a fucking gremlin,” Phil informs him, and Dream cackles. “Yeah, yeah, you and your fucking pranks. I don’t even wanna know what the cows were for. Moving on - you up for settling?”

Dream cuts off his laughter abruptly, blinks at Phil. “You mean like - ” he waves his hands in a helpless gesture that nearly makes Phil laugh - the powers of gods are abstract, near-impossible to describe or contextualize to humans, and even between minor gods it can be difficult to put into words. “Uh, what do I - I’m just gonna reach out, ‘s that fine?”

“Sure, go for it,” Phil says encouragingly; he learned his lesson on going for a full settling when he asked Dream to try a week ago when they first met up, whereupon Dream completely wiped out for the rest of the afternoon. It’s easier for Dream to reach out, present his awareness, his perception, touch lightly upon what he and the world around him already know, a clarification as opposed to an active give-and-take. It’s turned into his signature greeting, as indicative of personality as Schlatt or Puffy unthinkingly bumping their horns affectionately against others or a happy warble from Ranboo in ramshackle Ender. 

Dream draws in a long breath and raises his arms again, looser than when he was manipulating the dirt, palms facing up. When Phil asked, earlier on, Dream had shrugged and explained that while contact isn’t necessary, nor is any sort of physical movement, it’s out of habit; being in motion helps him focus, which is understandable coming from a young man that Phil thinks might buzz out of his skin some days with the force of his energy. It’s also, Phil muses wryly, a good prior indicator; if any of the SMP members realize he’s about to settle someone and push his limits, they can catch him before he completely wrecks his shit. 

Phil catches a pensive hum of _gentle over the rolling fields crest soft like a hill warmhearted and sun-drenched quiet calm quiet quiet serene today peaceable and calm_ before the silvery murmur shuts down abruptly. Phil had closed his eyes when he’d first heard the telltale melodic whisper, opens them now after shaking off the lethargic warmth he’d gleaned from the soothed settling in time to catch Dream slumping against the oak he’d newly raised from the earth, gasping, his face ashen. 

Phil lunges for him immediately with an alarmed cry of “Whoa there - steady, mate, there you go, let’s just get you set up here - ” he maneuvers Dream around so that the younger god’s back is against the tree trunk and rummages through his pockets for a flask of regen or strength. Dream immediately slides down, his legs failing him, and Phil barely manages to grab his shoulders in time to ensure he doesn’t just collapse like a puppet with clipped strings. “ _Okay_ \- okay, we’re going down now, cool.”

Dream presses a hand to his chest, breaths coming in jittery jolts, the color in his face getting worse. Phil sets his jaw, thinks of days when an explosion was too big or a paint streak too red and his sons would crumple under the weight of the air too heavy to breathe, and it’s not the same, this isn’t that kind of visceral panic - but all the same, he says, soothing, “Alright, didn’t expect that, but that’s alright - just straighten out your shoulders so you got more room for your lungs to expand, yeah? Vibe for a second ‘til it chills out.” Dream jerks his head in a forceful nod, and Phil keeps half an eye on him as he retracts his wings back into his haori and fishes a golden apple out of his pocket. There’s a brief spasm of pain that flickers over Dream’s face, fleeting, but it’s gone again when Phil passes the apple to him; Phil sits back onto his heels, watching over Dream carefully as he clenches the apple in one hand and keeps his head tilted back with the other, taking deep breaths. The initial thunderflash of worry that had burned at the back of Phil’s mind fades out, but not enough to actually comfort him; unbidden, he thinks, _It’s not getting better._

It - the faltering, the occasional hiccups in power, the backlash from his settling so harsh it rattles Dream as though he were the earth he controls - wasn’t too severe at the very beginning, when Dream was still largely bedridden, the only thing he was allowed to or even able to do a flippant weather change. It’s only become more noticeable in recent weeks - sometimes Dream won’t be doing anything at all, just walking down the Prime Path chattering away genially with somebody, and then he’ll stumble in the middle of his words, fall to a knee, lose his breath, or he’ll spend a night with a blazing fever that’s gone without a trace the next morning. It scared the hell out of everyone the first time something like it happened - Tubbo, especially, who’d been walking with him at the time and had no idea what to do as Dream keeled over. Something’s not right - it’s not getting worse, but it’s not improving, either, and nobody knows what “it” is, least of all Dream himself, who woke up the morning after his spontaneous sickness bewildered at the number of people fussing over him. As Wilbur put ever-so-concisely: if Phil doesn’t know what’s wrong, something’s _very_ wrong.

Still, it’s not an especially bad turn, for all that Dream’s gasping like he’s done the MCC parkour course five times over. Phil nudges the apple in Dream’s hand with a raised eyebrow, and Dream huffs but takes a bite anyway. Immediately, the whisper of absorption threads warm and yellow over Dream’s skin, and the younger god untenses inch by inch, relief all over what bit of his face Phil can see.

“Better, mate?” he asks, and Dream nods once fervently. 

“It’s not usually that bad,” he muses, then freezes under Phil’s sudden glare. “Uh.”

“‘Usually?’” Phil repeats slowly. 

“I’m having some déjà vu,” Dream tells him blithely, a weak attempt at diversion. Phil pinches the bridge of his nose, seriously weighs the pros and cons of calling Techno and making him haul the six-foot-and-pocket-change idiot god with a hero complex to rival Tommy’s back to the heart of L’Manberg, then finally decides against it and lets go of the instinctive urge to scold with a sigh. There’s no point - it’s something that’s out of Dream’s control, and people don’t leave him by himself long enough these days to let him suffer alone anyway.

Dream crunches again on the golden apple, eyeing Phil pensively, his gaze searching. The line of his mouth twitches, uncertain, and Phil can read the hesitation that comes before a confession from a hundred chunks away (“Just dad things,” Tubbo had chirped once, cheerfully, and Phil had stared down at him, all of twenty-two years old, a blisteringly bright something blooming behind his sternum). “If you got something you wanna say, mate, just say it.”

Dream blinks, startled, then grins wryly. “I go to all the trouble of wearing a mask and everyone can still tell what I’m thinking,” he says jokingly, readjusting said mask as he talks. “Makes me wonder why I bother.”

 _Why do you,_ Phil almost asks, bites down on the words at the last second. Going beyond common courtesy, it’s a matter of respect; as far as Phil knows, no one has ever asked, and Dream has never offered. If Phil recalls correctly, Sapnap is the only person to have ever seen Dream’s face, and that must have been when they were children, seeing as Sam doesn’t know, either. Still, decency dictates they all leave well enough alone, so they do, and Phil wipes the brief flicker of curiosity from his mind decisively.

“Well,” hedges Dream, breaking Phil out of his thoughts, “I was just thinking - no one ever told you about how I got my settling, did they?”

“Not in full,” admits Phil, a bit surprised by the topic. “I got an abridged version of the story from Techno. He said you got it from an elder?”

Dream snorts. “That’s not abridged - that’s pretty much all I gave them. I mean - it’s so _hard_ to explain godly things to humans. Not that being human is bad!” he says hurriedly, so much dismay in his eyes at any possible misinterpretation that Phil has to pat his arm with a soothing “It’s fine, mate, I get it, I understand. You wanna tell me about it?”

Dream’s gaze flickers to him for a moment, a touch faraway. “You’re a minor god, too. I figured you should hear this. You probably have a better idea of what it was supposed to be, or something.”

“I can’t guarantee anything, but I can listen.”

“That’s fine.” Dream tips his chin back, and the sun dapples vaguely onto his face, squeezing past the clusters of leaves overhead. “I was... wow, it must’ve been, like... ten years ago. I was eleven or so, I’m pretty sure. George would probably know better. Anyway. I, um... there’s this old god that I knew. Like, when I was still alone in my home world.”

Phil feels his eyebrows lift clear into his hairline. “You _knew_ an elder?” he says, and it’s not really incredulity that seeps into his tone, but the surprise is there; contact between old gods and anyone who isn’t an old god is rare, after all, let alone repeated meetings with the same one. 

“Yeah,” Dream replies with a half-grin, shrugging a little sheepishly. It drops off of his face as he goes on, “They were...” he waves his hand in a helpless gesture, struggling to find the words, before finally settling on, “... _ethereal._ I mean, I haven’t seen them in years, but once, when I was pretty young, I messed my arm up bad running from mobs in a mineshaft, and that’s when they showed up. I couldn’t tell you why they chose to help _me_ of all people - there are people out there who are permanently disabled, y’know? And I’m a minor god - I probably could’ve helped myself. But I walled myself in, basically a sitting duck, and then they appeared before me.” Dream’s laugh shuffles out of him. “I thought I was seeing things, at first. They were... they were really tall, and they patted me on my bad arm and the pain just...” he mimes a small explosion with his hands. “Poof. Gone.”

Phil drops his gaze to Dream’s left arm, to the coils of bandages around it visible where he keeps his hoodie sleeves pushed up. “Isn’t it still bad?”

A wry look passes over Dream’s face as he rolls his left shoulder. “Nah. Not really, not anymore. It’s just a weak point on my body - phantom pain or something, I guess. I mean, I kinda use it a lot for shieldwork and stuff. It’s not like it hurts all the time or anything.”

Phil has to agree on that point - if there were any downside to being a minor god that he’d pick on, it would probably be the fact that because they can’t respawn, they tend to retain injuries a lot more. Respawn is essentially a human’s get-out-of-jail-free card for mortal wounds, and while they can scar, and phantom pain can chase them out of the grave, it’s more common to see minor gods struggling with things like that. Phil’s own very occasional limp has nothing to do with his age, thank you very much, even if his sons like to poke fun about it; after all, he’s still young too. 

“Okay, sorry, that was way off-track,” Dream says apologetically. He drops the core of the golden apple into the grass by his side and pulls his hair from its ponytail, starts to comb it over one shoulder with his fingers, continues, “Yeah, so, this old god is one I knew for a while. Like, they weren’t a - they weren’t always there, or anything, but I’d see them every so often. I think I started to count on them a little bit. I had George and Sapnap and the others, of course, but the old god only ever really came by when I was alone, and it was nice, ‘cause they’d told me when I was younger that I should be careful about myself and being a minor god, which is honestly pretty good advice for a kid as crazy as I was.” Quiet, “It’s why I got the mask.”

“Oh,” says Phil, because he has no idea what else he can say. There’s a trust running bone-deep under Dream’s words, a heartfelt and fundamental adoration, and Phil recognizes it all too well, even if Dream doesn’t seem to know what it’s supposed to be.

Of course a parent can see what the old god felt like to Dream.

“Um.” Dream clears his throat. “It was... like I said, I was probably ten. It was a blizzardy winter, so I went out one night before the snow got too bad to see if I could hunt something down. I saw them - the elder - out in the field somewhere and went to them, and I was excited, ‘cause it had been a while and everything, and they...”

A pause. Silence, save the crisp rasp of the late-autumn wind combing through the heavy boughs of the oak they’re sat under, a brilliantly green beacon in the middle of a slew of silver and crimson-orange birches.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget them,” Dream says, soft. “For giving me this. For letting me be able to do this.”

_gentle gentle easy over the sun gleam of the stars on faces unharmed plains untouched untraversed wanderlust adoring adoring adoring they’re yours they’re yours murmur somnolent safe and adored they’re yours now and forever they’re_

“I think that’s enough for today, mate,” Phil says gently, valiantly speaking around the lump in his throat. “You feeling better?”

Dream stretches, sighs, smiles. “Yeah. A lot better. Thanks, Phil. For - for the training, and for listening.”

Phil snorts and says, “Hardly training, but we have to cut it short anyway. I think Wil didn’t talk to Eret and Ponk about the suits, the little shit.”

Dream’s head snaps up in the middle of getting back to his feet, delight sparking bright on his face. “Oh my god. He hasn’t asked yet? The wedding’s literally two days away!”

“Tell me about it,” Phil groans, pulling off his hat to ruffle his hair. It’s getting a little long; he probably ought to get a trim soon, clean up nice for the boys. “Those two are probably swamped right now. I feel a bit bad.”

“They’re fine, I think Eret enlisted H and Alyssa. Niki, maybe. I saw Fundy, too, but I think he’s there just because. I mean, better sooner than later.”

“You’re not wrong.” Phil stands, as well, stretching his wings as far as they’ll go, his primaries brushing the bark of the trees on either side of the clearing. He won’t be able to fly here unless Dream is open to merging his world with one Phil’s made, but given the events that wracked the server just a month prior, Phil’s leaving the topic alone for now; god knows things have been rough for the SMP members. It’s not so bad, anyway, since Phil can still perform such important tasks as ruffle his sons’ heads or smack someone out of the reach of his arms just fine. “Yeah, I think I’ll head out to the Greater SMP in a bit. You comin’ with, mate?”

“Sure. Ponk’ll probably ask me to summon more sheep for all the wedding outfits, so I might as well.” Dream pulls his hair back into its usual half-up half-down, straightens out his clothes, picks a few dry leaves from from his cargos. With another quicksilver grin: “I can’t believe they’re finally doing it. They’ve been sitting on this for so long that I thought they were just gonna be fiancés forever.”

“Procrastination,” says Phil sagely. 

“Karl’s probably the one who snapped and made it happen. I can’t see Sapnap or Quackity remembering that they didn’t do the thing that they proposed for.”

Phil laughs at that, tossing the apple core into the composter by his sink through the open kitchen window. Turning and hiking his pack higher on his shoulder, he tells Dream, “You’re probably right. Ready to go?”

Dream nods, pulls his own pack onto his shoulder and winces at the last second. At Phil’s immediate glare, he rolls his eyes and moves the pack to his right, and they both set off for the direction of human contact, bantering, the midmorning sun catching the white of Dream’s mask and glancing off, fractalling. 

It’s a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a minute detail that i liked too much to just leave to close reading: the “grey-eyed with hurt” line is one i picked up on later, but - grey-eyed was a descriptor commonly applied to athena, goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare. i used this in reference to the younger people of the server. make of this what you will.


	2. ours to put donuts in!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> our bodies are ours to break, / ours to throw into rivers, ours to light on fire, / ours to launch into the depths of space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i spent an inordinate amount of time debating whether or not to capitalise “heelys” and now it doesn’t look like a real word anymore. anyway
> 
> this is also part of my mission to spread oh hellos propaganda. go listen to the oh hellos every song feels like a gut punch and reminds me of my lovely friend and platonic fiancee tea
> 
> had to look up “little hat accessory” three times whilst writing this chapter because for the life of me i couldn’t remember the word “fascinator” and couldn’t be bothered to go hunt for it in the chapter itself because, much like the smp members in this chapter that are wearing strapless dresses in thirty-degree fahrenheit weather, i am lazy

“I’m not late,” George announces grandly as he strides into the main ballroom of Eret’s castle. He’s warmly welcomed by a rice basket directly to the face. 

“Shocker,” calls Purpled from the side of the room drily. When George looks up from picking up the basket, scandalized, Purpled is neatening the clusters of pale purple alliums dotting the strew of folding chairs arranged in haphazard rows over the dark oak floor, a criminally innocent look on his face. Violet and blue and faintly turquoise banners unfurl over the walls, adorned with curlicues of exceedingly elaborate calligraphy that George recognizes as from Phil’s steady hand, in honor of Karl’s eye-watering wizard-retro fashion sense. The aisle down to the arch is carpeted with a mix of navy and bright orange wool that George suspects is probably Dream’s fault somehow, and further to the back await a dozen mismatched tables that they all plan to drag out onto the carefully-groomed garden for the reception. There are others milling about, making last-minute adjustments to settings or decorations or one another’s makeup, and altogether it looks like a beautiful headache that George will fully admit chokes him up a little.

The culmination of... about a week and a half of frantic planning and caffeine-fuelled madness, actually, but the sentiment still stands.

“You’re definitely late,” teases a voice from behind him, and George rolls his eyes and makes to throw the rice basket back at Dream. Dream dances out of the way with a bark of laughter, the image of him more fluid than usual thanks to the ripple of his long, flowy dress, and George has to stop and beam at his best friend no matter how fake-annoyed he is, because Dream looks great - Eret had asked people what they wanted to wear before starting to put things together, and nearly half the guests asked if a dress was feasible. Most of them ended up having to construct them themselves, but save the incident wherein HBomb nearly completed a “wedding catmaid” outfit before he was promptly taken out by Punz, the process went surprisingly smoothly. Someone’s styled Dream’s hair for him, too, braided the edges of his curls back and pinned them into place with an emerald that matches the pale gradient of the skirt.

George himself is stuck in a suit because he doesn’t trust himself to be at all graceful in a dress, but watching Dream prance around in his makes something heat in his chest, fond in a prickling way; Dream’s always liked clothes that don’t restrict his movement, hates suits as a matter of principle, and despite everything that all of them have been through, it’s nice to see Dream laughing as Callahan, waddling around in his awkwardly-fitting skirt worn in general solidarity, flips him off.

“Who’s marrying them?” George asks at large, turning his attention back to the rest of the crowd puttering around. Schlatt and Punz are nowhere to be seen, probably because those are the two slated to walk Quackity and Karl down the aisle respectively, but everyone else on the server is either settling into their seats. George catches a glimpse of Puffy commiseratingly handing a box of tissues to Bad, who already looks halfway to tears, and stifles his smirk into his hand. 

“Me.” Wilbur stands up from his seat with a flourish, the canary yellow cape dress he’s wearing trailing after his arms as he raises them. The overall gentleness of his outfit, completed by the identically-yellow fascinator on his head, is severely curtailed by his bright red split lip from tripping and falling flat on his face on the Prime Path, which George had unabashedly laughed at him for. Wilbur announces, with affected showmanship in the height of his vowels, “I, Wilbur Soot, will bless these three hands in their very dramatic and very valid platonic marriage by the power vested in me by Church Prime.”

“God, Wil, save it for the ceremony,” laughs Phil from the seat beside him, batting Wilbur’s hair with his wing. Turning in his chair and tucking his floor-length sleeve over the back, he adds to George, amused, “And shouldn’t you be heading out to help Sapnap, mate?”

“Oh, shit,” George says immediately, standing up straighter and peering around to try to spot Dream. The tall and unfairly agile bastard is saying something energetically to Alyssa as the latter powders something furiously onto his cheeks, but when George whistles sharply his head snaps around like a dog.

“Sapnap,” he calls by way of explanation, and Dream visibly brightens. He waves goodbye to a disgruntled Alyssa and jogs over, remarkably light on his feet for someone who had to have the dress re-hemmed because Eret always wears heeled shoes with their dresses and he’d kept tripping over the skirt. George has to quickly swerve to avoid Niki, who has a tin of colorful powders in her hand and a wicked gleam in her eye, and Tubbo, who’s been slated to make sure Ranboo doesn’t snap an ankle in the platform boots he’d insisted upon wearing, but he and Dream manage to escape from the venue unscathed.

The room in question is stationed in the hall perpendicular to the one leading into the ballroom, once again graciously provided by Eret upon Wilbur’s insistence that the grooms don’t lay eyes upon one another until they reach the altar in the interest of warding off bad luck. It was, in George’s humble opinion, a lost cause from the beginning, since Karl and Quackity are next-door neighbors and Sapnap stays over at one of theirs whenever he’s not mooching off of George’s crisps, and at least half the server was awoken by Ponk screaming that the grooms had seen one another at ten in the morning, but he supposes it’s the thought that counts. The pageantry of it all is nice, in a way; there’s something brightly anticipatory in George’s core that he’s tamped down for a while, that he gets to fully bask in now: his best friend is getting married to his friends, and the entire SMP is going to throw a blowout party for them, because platonic or not, a wedding is a wedding. 

Sapnap, getting married.

Caught under a sudden swell of emotion, George completely blanks on which door is Sapnap’s and stares stupidly until Dream rolls his eyes and tugs him to the one farthest left with an affectionate, “You’re so dumb, come on.”

The moment they set foot in the room, Sapnap turns to look at them and shrieks.

“You two are assholes! I can hear Schlatt talking next door, why are you guys so late?” he demands with little actual heat, tugging them both to the mirror propped up in the corner of the room opposite the very fancy wardrobe. He’s near bouncing off the walls, all kinetic energy in the anticipatory nervousness in his face, beaming in spite of himself. “C’mon, look at me, gimme a pep talk or something!”

“I feel like you don’t need one,” George replies drily, but he lets himself be dragged over to the corner nonetheless. He nearly falls flat on his face when his feet get tangled up in the tulle of Sapnap’s dress, but Sapnap hoists him back up with annoyingly little effort. 

_It’s all the dopamine,_ George thinks ruefully, watching as Sapnap fucking _giggles. What happiness does to a motherfucker._

“You look beautiful,” Dream informs Sapnap cheerily, not helping the already spiralling situation at all. He circles Sapnap once, smoothing the tail of Sapnap’s veil where it had gotten crushed against his back, then pats his arms and says, softer, the green of his eyes suspiciously bright, “Honestly. You look great, Pandas.”

George doesn’t know why it’s the “Pandas,” of all things, that makes him tear up treacherously. Connotations, and whatnot; George had joined the pack by the time Sapnap had already changed his name, but he’d picked up on the old nickname from Sam and Dream, and it’s something quiet and private between the eight of them now, reserved for four-in-the-morning delirious softness or a murmur over feverish brows. Or it would be, if Callahan hadn’t emphatically signed _Pandas is getting married? There’s hope for the rest of us assholes yet!_ on the table at the weekly breakfast and had promptly been brained by an apple thrown by Skeppy, but still - there’s a telltale burn at the back of George’s throat that heralds a possible emotional breakdown.

He’s fortunately saved by Sapnap’s eyes flooding first, then him saying, strangled, “Oh, fuck, I can’t cry, Alyssa spent _so_ much time on this makeup and she’ll literally kill me if I ruin it now - ” and George fishes one of Schlatt’s handkerchiefs to pass to Sapnap and discreetly tips his head back and takes a very loud, very shuddery breath.

Dream looks unbearably fond when George looks back down, and George can tell by the shift of his hair that he’s raised an eyebrow. “You’re both so dumb,” he says, heartfelt, and _love oh love countless nights by the fire adrenaline stark the void in your veins every day and forever and always_ winds between them like a purring housecat.

“Now you’re just actively trying to make him cry,” says George thickly, pointing at the valiantly sniffling Sapnap. Dream grins sheepishly, takes the handkerchief, and dutifully pats at Sapnap’s face.

The abrupt knock at the door makes all of them jump a little - a month and a half, it seems, isn’t long enough to heal all wounds - but when George is shooed away by Sapnap to answer it, it’s just Punz in his cloudlike ball gown, awfully casual in the dress for someone whose usual taste in clothes involves five variations of the same hoodie over the same joggers. “Yo,” he greets. “Someone’s started playing music, and I think that’s our cue to get out there.”

“Who’s going first?” calls Dream from inside the room, stuffing the handkerchief hastily into the folds of Sapnap’s skirt and standing him up. “I feel like we never talked about the order.”

Punz shrugs and replies, “I don’t think we did, either, if that makes you feel better.”

“Oh, just send them in the order the rooms are,” George cuts in impatiently, because the faint opening chords of the organ music Wilbur had managed to get his hands on are beginning to make itself heard in the hallway. “We can go first, then send Quackity, then send Karl.”

“Your brainpower is appreciated,” Punz drawls, withdrawing from the doorway. George watches him lug the dress back down the hall, and as Punz turns into Karl’s room he throws over his shoulder, “Tell Sapnap Wilbur knows he saw his fiancés before the wedding, by the way.”

“He _knows?”_ demands Sapnap, terrified, from behind George. Dream starts to laugh so hard that it takes another three minutes before any of them are composed enough to even consider getting ready to go.

They make a motley crew as they emerge at the foot of the headache-inducing carpet down to the altar, Sapnap’s arms looped through George and Dream’s, one in green and one in blue and one in pearly white. It occurs to George dimly through the cacophony of keyboard resonating in the high-arched ballroom (thanks to the twenty jukeboxes topped with frothy white flowers lining either side of the rows of chairs) that they probably should have rehearsed this or something - he has no idea how fast they’re supposed to be walking or where they’re meant to go after they strand Sapnap on the altar, nor if he has to say anything during the ceremony itself. The small, sudden swell of anxiety makes his steps slow, and Sapnap keeps looking forward, chin up, eyes bright, but Dream’s gaze flickers over with a fondly exasperated _proud and adored and calm calm calm everything settled everything soothed_ and George lets go of the cold dregs of his nerves as easy as breathing with a discreet glare toward Dream, who’s turned back toward the altar, lips twitching. 

It’s a mercy to see Schlatt and Quackity enter; Schlatt’s filled back out since the dark early days he couldn’t keep anything down, his horns robust and filed down primly, the cheeky slant to his mouth anything but an affectation. Quackity’s smiling widely, remarkably tidy in his midnight blue suit and crimson bowtie, but the goddamn _veil beanie_ is what sets off some of the audience, and when Schlatt relinquishes his grip on Quackity and watches on with a smirk as the madman _heelies_ to the altar - 

“I knew it from the moment I met you,” remarks Sapnap, completely straight-faced. Quackity performs a superb spin, comes to a clean stop, and socks Sapnap in the arm with a snicker.

“This wedding,” says Wilbur from behind the podium, somewhat mournfully, “is going off the rails.”

“If you wanted professionality, you are officiating the wrong group of friends,” teases Niki from the front row, and as if a dam has broken, the entire audience busts out laughing. George presses a fist to his mouth and ducks his head, trying to maintain some modicum of dignity, but Dream murmurs dolefully, “Someone else is officiating ours,” and really, there’s no salvaging the situation after that.

It’s into this delirium that Punz walks Karl, and it’s only because Punz gets a gleam in his eye and unsheathes part of the sword buckled in haphazardly over the poufs of his skirt that everyone finally gasps out their final giggles and settles back into their seats. It relaxes George just a bit, shakes him out of the mindset that nothing must go wrong - it’s just their friends, twenty-odd of them, passing tissues around and ribbing one another gently. There’s no need to fuss over margins of error, perfection, not with half of them planning to throw tomatoes at the newlyweds and the other half armed to the teeth with tissues and waterproof makeup.

Then George sees Karl and chokes for the second time that day.

“Oh, Karl,” someone whispers from within the crowd of chairs, sounding incredibly choked up. George can’t tell whether it’s genuine emotion or if it’s because Karl is dressed in the loudest color-clashing, headache-inducing cloak and suit combo as of yet exposed to the eyes of mankind, complete with a space-themed pointed hat.

“Effervescent.”

Karl smiles, and it somehow brings the nightmare costume together like a ray of sunshine. George is beyond questioning things at this point.

Punz delivers Karl at the altar with a pat on the back and a kind, “You’re killing it, bro,” and trots off to join Schlatt in standing off to the other side of the trio. The juxtaposition of his casual parade rest, his hands clasped at the sheath of his sword in front of him, with the cloudy gown nearly makes George burst out laughing again, but Dream, as if sensing him about to break, stomps firmly on his toes and makes George quiet down as the entire audience takes a deep inhale, all eyes on the three friends grinning at each other as though no one else exists save one another. Sapnap reaches out to straighten Quackity’s beanie. Quackity bats at one of the stars dangling from the brim of Karl’s hat. Karl pats down the airy skirt of Sapnap’s gown, transfixed.

Sapnap, Karl, and Quackity, getting married.

Wilbur clears his throat.

“Dearly beloved,” he begins, voice steady, “we are gathered here today in the presence of these witnesses, to join Sapnap, Karl, and Quackity in platonic matrimony, which is commended to be honorable among all people...”

George leans over slightly to hiss disbelievingly out of the corner of his mouth, “How did he memorize all this?” as Wilbur continues, unwavering, the fascinator nested in his curls catching the golden lamplight and haloing him. 

Dream makes a noncommittal noise. “He’s a writer,” he whispers back with half a shrug, nudging George with his arm. “And a singer, and a poet, and an actor. Creative jack-of-all-trades. He can probably memorize anything.”

“Lucky.”

Dream hums. George can see his eyes go unwarrantedly soft as the three elbow one another and titter amongst themselves, then quail under Wilbur’s stink-eye. Wilbur picks back up with a less-scripted “You three are about to be platonically wedded under the eye of this server’s god. He’s standing literally right over there. Are you all fine with this commitment? Dream is perfectly capable of smiting you if you lie for someone else’s benefit right now.”

Dream smiles with all his teeth, a manhunt-familiar gesture that makes George inch away subconsciously. To their credit, none of the three standing crowded on the altar look at all intimidated; if anything, the joking air has leached from them, and though Sapnap, farthest left, is the only one whose expression George can read, he looks dead serious as he says, “Yeah, I’m down for this.”

“Same here.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The uncompromising set of Wilbur’s mouth eases up into a smile. “Right, then,” he says, then gestures to them and says, “Have you lot got anything to say to each other? Vows, and whatnot? It’s fine if you don’t, but if you do, now’s the time to say them.”

There’s a gaping silence that barely edges into awkward territory before Quackity laughs and rubs the back of his neck and says, in a stage whisper, “We probably should’ve rehearsed this thing beforehand, huh?” and preens at the ripple of chuckles he gets. He bows in response to the few shouts of “Go, Big Q!” and turns back to Karl and Sapnap, and the line of his shoulders squares.

George lets himself drift in the flow of unhesitating words from the fiancés for a moment, the cadence of their vows. All of their voices are gentle, familiar with one another, a pause in the chaos that they usually create together in a constant positive feedback loop, the eye of the hurricane, and it’s soothing, the way they speak to one another painfully genuinely, even if it’s not necessarily in their natures to do so. 

It’s Dream’s fingers suddenly digging into George’s arm, almost dragging him down, that brings him back into himself. He startles, glances up into Dream’s face, and feels alarm skid through his veins with a chill when he sees how pale Dream’s gone.

“Dr - ” he starts to say, then is abruptly shut up by the controlled wave of _shh shh the tide is in the tide is out shh the water is smooth shh_ and Dream’s hand tightening for the barest second on his arm, a clear warning. George bites his tongue against the instinct that screams at him to halt everything, lower Dream to the floor, and root around for a healing pot, and instead holds himself perfectly still as Dream catches his breath, as Dream hangs onto George, the only thing keeping him upright.

“Bring forth the rings,” says Wilbur grandiosely, and Tommy kicks the doors open for himself and Ranboo and Tubbo with a velvet pillow cradled in his arms, bellowing a movie theme in acapella and blessedly drawing all eyes to the spectacle. It gives George the leeway to turn fully, grab Dream by the arms, let him lean his weight against him, whispering, “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Dream, why - ”

“Nothing,” Dream mouths into George’s hair. “Head rush - I just got dizzy all of a sudden. It’s nothing, I’m completely fine.”

“If you’re lying to me - ”

“Would I ever, Georgie?” Dream cuts him off, the teasing lilt to his voice trembling at the end, but George doesn’t have the time to shake some sense into him or stare doubtfully at him - Tommy, carrying one pillow, and Ranboo, teetering behind him on Tubbo’s shoulder with the other pillow, arrive before the fiancés and present them with the rings, reflecting the glowstone with matching glints. 

“Thank you,” Karl says graciously, scooping up all three rings in one sweep of his star-spangled cloak and turning to Sapnap and Quackity, both of whom squawk and look at him with such comical outrage that George has to laugh despite himself. Dream’s hand is still tight on his arm.

The three watch Tommy, Tubbo, and Ranboo go back to their seats - “Whoa, careful there, Ranboo,” Schlatt calls when Ranboo stumbles in his six-inch platforms, and George thanks whatever elder is looking down upon them that Ranboo didn’t wear a dress with how unwieldy he is even just as a seven-foot-one suit-clad teenager - and then turn to one another again. A slightly ridiculous game of “who can get a ring on whose finger the fastest” ensues, with both Karl and Sapnap trying to jam their respective rings onto Quackity’s finger, then the latter two ganging up on Karl, but finally, after breathless tittering and a jokingly withering glare from Wilbur, they manage to look up at the lectern with a ring on each hand.

“By the power vested in me by Church Prime - ”

“When the hell are we letting that bit go - ”

“ - shut the fuck up, Sapnap - by the power vested in me by Church Prime and Dream, I now pronounce you husband, husband, and husband!”

Everyone erupts into cheering and laughing and crying; through the rain of variegated streamers Sam and Skeppy somehow rigged up from the balustrades off the second story of the ballroom, George can make out Purpled hurling fistfuls of rice at the newlyweds as Sapnap scoops up Karl and races down the aisle, hooting, and Quackity heelies after them with his hands tucked in his pockets and deftly dodges the various fruits being tossed at him. 

Dream exhales slowly beside George, then steps forward, and under Sapnap and Quackity’s feet, the carpet morphs into a sink of brown and damp - dirt, suddenly leading out into the main hall. Quackity yelps as his Heelys sink into the soil, and Sapnap makes a noise of surprise as he readjusts to the different absorption of the terrain underfoot.

“Wh - ”

Dream’s grin is wide and wild and warm as a spring field as he stomps his foot into the floor.

A veritable _sea_ of flowers froths up in brilliant colors around the newlyweds: stalks of sunflowers with their heavy heads turned toward the frozen Sapnap and Karl and Quackity, summer-sky-blue sprays of cornflowers against a carpet of dainty bluets, pink tulips twined through the arcs of lilies of the valley. Petals flutter down amongst the colorful ribbons, and the heady-sweet scent of flowers clouds the ballroom, even as big as it is.

“Congratulations,” says Dream breathlessly.

George may have dove out of the way of Sapnap diving to tackle Dream in a hug, but in his defense, his life flashed before his eyes as stark as the white of Sapnap’s veil, so.

It only takes five minutes for all of them to spill out into Eret’s diligently tidied gardens, the tables in tow, and despite the oncoming chill hinting at the month of December, every single person on this hell server is too stubborn or too lazy to change out of their outfits, so George correctly assumes everyone will choose to suffer rather than go and change into something more comfortable for the reception. It’s a setup for a beautiful party, all things considered; the sun is a sliver melting over the ink-dark horizon, and the lanterns and firefly jars George helped set up in advance offer an amber ambiance to the tented roof and makeshift dance floor and buffet tables. Before starting the music, Quackity insists on forcing Schlatt to say something for a best man speech that Punz, George, and Dream all managed to worm their ways out of, and for all that he was put on the spot, the former president does one hell of a job at moving everyone close to tears as he waxes expletive-riddled poetic about his first encounter with Quackity, nights spent teaching him how to gamble, and, quieter, how proud he is. George clears his throat into his wine glass of sparkling grape juice and steadfastly ignores Dream full-on weeping into his lemonade.

The mood does a complete one-eighty after Schlatt is given a standing ovation, though. Callahan and HBomb, the designated DJs, only need exchange looks once before a chillstep remix of “That’s What I Like” echoes out like a dirge over the castle grounds. It takes four people to restrain Tommy, who practically froths at the mouth, and from there, it’s free game - George works his way through a plate of sliders and half of a tostada before he’s dragged into a lawless spinning dance where the objective is seemingly to twirl in what eventually resolves itself into a huge group circle and to pass your partner to other people as often as possible as “Soldier, Poet, King” loops endlessly in the background. George cycles through Alyssa, Techno, Ant, Jack, Phil, and Karl in quick succession before getting dizzy enough to tap out and just observe from the sidelines as someone tries to b-boy and fails miserably, and Ponk dramatically reveals through demonstration that he’s much better at popping than initially suspected.

The night gets long, and people that were sitting and watching start to get roped into small dances, even if it’s just to hype others up. George is watching Purpled attempt to do a worm wedged between Sam and Sapnap when he thinks, achingly tender, _I love them._

A blink. A breath.

The server code shudders to the left.

All five admins reel at the same time, hands coming up reflexively to stare down at the screens on their wrists. George can’t hear someone - the cant of their voice low, so Eret - calling his name over the ringing in his ears, like a clamor of trumpets; at any rate, he’s busy scrolling frantically through his screen, prodding the server barriers, the whitelist, the security that he and the other admins had tightened with barbed wire after - after the festival. He looks up in time to make eye contact with Sam, whose red-ring eyes are round with surprise, and he barely sees Dream's head dart up, and - 

With the gentle rasp of tearing fabric, the burr of a zipper unzipping, the air of the stretch of green extending beyond the reception party goes dark, or heavy, or collapses in onto itself, and something - someone, that’s someone - clambers through in two steps with the grace of a mountain lion.

They’re - tall. Gargantuan, in fact, easily dwarfing the tallest members of the server in what appears to be bare feet, dark between the blades of grass. Their hair waterfalls down their back in a single tail, jet-black, accentuating the quartz white of their clothes. Nothing loud, nothing extraordinary, not a single speck of dust or dirt: a high collar, a cinched rope belt, a heavy skirt that hangs down to their ankles. Their eyes - their eyes are - 

“Holy _shit,”_ a voice whimpers.

Their eyes are unreal, cut out from the Void itself, dark as the depths of the End, speckled with constellations that wink when their gaze moves, as though they were a paper cutout and the Void flowed behind. George knows instinctively, without need of logic or calculations run: An old god is standing on Eret’s front lawn.

“An elder,” whispers Sapnap through the hand clapped over his mouth, eyes round as ender pearls. “There’s no other way to get through that whitelist filter - they must be - ”

No one is prepared for Dream to collapse onto the grass.

“Dream?!” yelps George, swiftly winding between people to sink into a crouch beside him, his hands on Dream’s bare freckled shoulders, and he’s saying, “Dream, come on, hey - ” when he sees the look on Dream’s face and all the words built up on his tongue wither pitifully away.

 _Thunderstruck_ doesn’t even begin to encompass it. Dream is afloat, adrift, far, far away from the rest of them, from the cream-colored roof pitched over the silverware and cake and jars of fireflies and gold filigree dripping off the tablecloths and triplet rings glinting on three clasped hands, wandering amongst stars, wandering amongst Void, and it’s the ichor more than the blood that croons under his voice when he speaks.

“You,” he says.

The elder, still as a statue, finally blinks once. Looks to Dream. Their expression inscrutable as the faded moon in early morning.

And then they open their arms, and Dream makes a noise so heartrendingly full of _relief and coming home and being undone it’s you it’s you finally after all these years after all these hurts after all these tears it’s you you you_ that George’s legs lose their ability to hold him, and he finds himself sat helplessly as Dream stands on unsteady legs and almost sprints to the elder and fucking _throws his arms around them._

“What the _fuck,”_ squeaks out Tommy, but George can only really hear him distantly, as though through a dirty filter; his eyes are fixed on the way Dream’s shoulders shudder under the old god’s arms, how his face is buried in their stomach, the way they gently gently gently lay their hand on the tangle of his bronze curls like a tentative snowfall. The interaction feels rehearsed, polished smooth like a stone on the beach, both familiar and uncertain, like there’s new ground being trodden upon. George can’t breathe.

“Hello,” Dream says, quiet, reverent, pulling himself away from the old god with an effort. “Hello. It’s been - it’s been so long. How have you been?”

George is desperately curious, in that moment, what the old god’s voice sounds like. Sure, Dream gave them all the rough rundown of the source of his settling, but it’s pretty clear this elder is the very same one, and it’s also pretty clear that that night Dream was offered the settling wasn’t the first time they’ve met. Dream - and George feels his heart clench, and he can’t tell why - Dream looked so... so unbelievably awed.

He’d looked like he was coming home. George wants to hear the voice of the person who makes Dream feel as safe as that.

So when a long pause follows, and Dream’s inscrutable but sun-bright expression falters, George feels his hackles rise.

“...Are you,” Dream ventures, then hesitates, then reaches up, his fingers barely brushing the unmoving plane of the old god’s cheek. He must have expected some reaction, because when they stare back blankly, he cringes. “Are you - ”

A flicker over their face - a spasm of pain. Someone’s breath hisses out of them sharp - the odd rasp of it through a split lip, Wilbur, that’s Wilbur, breathless. A sudden, overwhelming pulse of foreboding. George feels his mouth drop open to say something - 

Dream stops. Looks down at the sword buried up to the hilt in his stomach, at the slender hand that holds it.

Over the roar of the hungry, ocean-deep terror in his ears, drowning out everything but Dream and the sword and the old god, George can see their mouth work strangely around a warped voice, can barely make out the words that stagger gracelessly from their throat.

**_“Oh... oh, no. No, no, no no no no... not like this... anyone but you, little dreamer...”_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and the comment section goes wild!
> 
> (i tried to wedge it into the chapter but it made the flow weird, so: the dresses that dream and wilbur wear are borrowed from eret because they’re the only ones tall enough to pull them off, though i doubt eret will get much use out of that green dress now)


End file.
